We see David looking for a place to hide a small metal valve. He settles on Vicki’s underwear drawer. She catches him going through it; he runs off, and she finds nothing missing. She would apparently rather not think about what he was doing in that particular drawer. Later, he will claim that he was trying to slip a present into the drawer- a seashell, at first; then, a magazine.
Alone in the upstairs hallway, Vicki sees the locked door to the closed-off part of the house open and close, apparently by itself. At first, she thinks it’s David playing a prank on her, but he comes out of his room so soon after that there doesn’t seem to be any way he could have done it. The show has been using the idea of ghosts in episode after episode to suggest that something big is about to happen; now, for the first time, we see an event that is either a supernatural manifestation or an elaborate, Scooby Doo-esque hoax perpetrated by some unknown person for some unknown reason. So what she’s doing now- looking for David, trying to figure out what he’s been up to- is directly connected to something that is disturbing the supernatural back-world of Collinwood. It may be a while before the back-world erupts into the foreground, and even longer before it crowds out everything else and becomes the whole show. But that little valve represents the first irretrievable step on the path that will lead to what Dark Shadows became.
This is also the first episode in which Vicki gets to make someone laugh. Carolyn says that she and Joe will probably go to a movie, because “What else is there to do in this town?” To which Vicki replies “You could get into a fight in a bar.” It’s also the last episode in which Vicki is allowed to make a joke. Humorlessness one of the things that will eventually squeeze the life out of the character. Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers her one good joke well enough that it clearly could have been otherwise. Those of us who wish Vicki had stayed at the center of the show all the way through can’t help but feel sad that it wasn’t to be.
Dark Shadows Commentary 